How M&A and Private Equity Can Benefit from Tailored AI Tools
Private capital has grown significantly in recent years, yet the industry has been slower to adopt new technology compared to other sectors. Many deal teams still rely heavily on manual processes, Excel models, and unstructured document storage. This is beginning to change.
Recent surveys show that roughly one-third of PE firms implemented some form of AI solution last year, with adoption projected to approach two-thirds by 2026. This acceleration reflects both a willingness to experiment and a recognition that the competitive environment is shifting. Firms that can gather, process, and act on information faster are better positioned to win deals and deliver returns.
Untapped Value in Deal Data
Most firms hold years of proprietary documents: due diligence reports, investment committee memos, pitch materials, market studies, and portfolio updates. These are often stored in a way that makes them hard to search and even harder to connect across deals. As a result, valuable insights are often lost to memory or buried in folders.
This is where a purpose built AI solution, designed specifically for M&A and PE, can make a difference. By combining access to external data sources such as Creditsafe or Morningstar with the ability to search across your own files using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), it becomes possible to retrieve relevant, reliable answers in minutes.
With RAG, documents are broken into smaller sections, stored in a searchable database, and matched to your query by meaning rather than just keywords. When you ask a question, the system retrieves the most relevant sections from all connected sources and uses them to generate a grounded response, cited with sources.
How This Differs from General AI Tools
General AI models such as ChatGPT are trained on public information and can, in some cases, browse the web. They can summarise an uploaded file, but the process is temporary. They do not store the file for future reference, nor can they combine it with other data sources unless you manually upload those as well.
A tailored AI solution can securely integrate with both internal and external data sources, maintain a searchable knowledge base over time, and ensure that only the most relevant context is used to answer your question. This reduces the risk of overlooking important information and saves time otherwise spent on manual searching and cross-checking.
Efficiency Gains
Preliminary analyses and due diligence is a natural starting point for this approach. Estimates suggest that investment professionals spend around a quarter of their time on repetitive due diligence tasks. Even modest reductions in this workload can translate into substantial savings at the firm level, particularly when multiplied across large teams. More importantly, it frees up time for higher-value activities such as deal structuring, relationship management, and strategic analysis.
A Glimpse of What Comes Next
The immediate benefit is faster, more reliable access to the right information. The next phase will be agentic workflows: AI that can act on instructions to complete multi-step tasks.
In an M&A context, this could mean:
- Creating a working group list based on the transaction type and your firm’s templates
- Drafting an investor relations letter or one-pager using your preferred structure and tone
- Collecting and summarising market intelligence on a target sector
- Compiling an initial list of potential targets with relevant background profiles
These capabilities will further reduce manual work and help deal teams move from information gathering to decision-making more quickly.
The Competitive Edge
Imagine asking:
“Find all past renewable energy deals in our files with EBITDA margins above 15%, summarise the main risks identified, and pull the latest data for similar companies in the market today.”
With a tailored AI solution, this is achievable in a matter of minutes.
As technology adoption accelerates in private capital, firms that build these capabilities early will be well placed to operate with greater speed, accuracy, and confidence.
You're sitting on a gold mine of data...
...we can help you leverage it.
If you're curious about how this could fit into your workflow, we'd be happy to help.